yayyyy

My Buffy dvds just got here! Gonna be a fun night.

I didn’t play any today but I have been thinking a lot about the state of my game and how I’ve been playing lately. I also saw some some pretty sick results in the SSNL thread on 2p2, so I’ve been inspired to drop back down to 1/2 for a bit and see if I can get back on track.

I’m all out of Buffy episodes :(

Until tomorrow anyway when Amazon ships me the complete third season DVD set 🙂 I’m also getting a pair of new earphones since my old headset quit on my yesterday.

Not much is new, I played a bit of 2/4 today and dropped about a buyin and a half in 800 hands, nothing too interesting happened but I lost a big flip and some other standard spots.

Plan for the rest of the week is to try (again) to get back on a healthy schedule. I’ve been talking with my parents a bit lately and we all agree I need to get some more structure in my day. I’m not happy waking up at 3pm and sitting around doing nothing all the time – it puts me in a crummy mood which I think is definitely contributing to my tilt issues.  I woke up at 10am today and hopefully I can make that a habit.

Basically I think with poker I’ve gotten to point where if I want to keep improving and moving up in limits I’m gonna have to start working on my game – up until this point I’ve been able to get away with more or less winging it, watching videos, reading the odd hand thread now and then. It’s time I step up my efforts and be a lot less lazy.

Sigh

Still tilting, still playing badly, still not making much money. Dropped another $2k today playing mostly 3/6. It’s just absurd how badly I play when I’m on tilt, and it seems like I’m constantly tilting. Probably time for a break, and I might have to drop back to 1/2 for a bit until I can get my mental game back on track. Blargh.

Another long session

I stayed up until about 7am last night playing my usual mix of 2/4 and 3/6, and finished up about $600 after 3k hands. So pretty bleh results. I continue to swing like crazy – I started off the session by quickly picking up $1.5k, then all of a sudden I was stuck $1.5k, and then I kind of wiggled my way back into the green.

I really really need to figure out how to control my tilt, since it’s just killing my results lately. It seems like every session I spew off several buyins for no good reason.

Which sucks because tbh I think I’ve been playing really well when I haven’t been tilting – I’ve been playing around with adding some floats into my game, and in general I think I’m taking away a lot more pots that I used to. So I’m pretty sure that if I can just quit going crazy now and then I could start posting some huge results.

Frustrated

Played a long session today at 2/4 and 3/6 today. Picked up a quick $2k right off the bat, then I dropped fairly precipitously down to -$1.5k, and finished down about $550. For some reason I was making a lot of really dumb decisions today – I lost a lot of money in spots where I should have been very +EV if only I had played them differently. Irritated and off to find some food.

One tabling is the new two tabling

So I’m apparently completely retarded and had no idea what “combined stats” were in pahud until last night when a friend enlightened me while we were doing a sweat session. I decided to fiddle around with them today and fired up one table of 2/4 on FTP. I finished up about $940 after 126 hands, so not bad.

I think I’m gonna go grab a shower and then see the 9:45 showing of 30 Days of Night. It looks ridiculously awesome and I’ll post a trip report later tonight.

Update: The movie was pretty crazy… I can’t really decide if I liked it or not. It’s gruesome as hell and very depressing (so definitely not as “fun” as I expected it to be), but it was definitely engaging – visually, aurally, the works. The casting is really good and the vampires look fucking amazing… but God damn it was depressing, and I frankly have no clue who or what the vampires were supposed to be. So I guess I’m disappointed it wasn’t better but I’m still glad I went.

Fun all-nighter

For some reason I got the urge to do a little two tabling starting around 4am this morning. I played about 500 hands, half 2/4 and half 3/6, and finished up about $1550.

Playing only two tables for a change was pretty fun to be honest – I was able to do a much better job of holding back tilt, plus it was neat to be able to get away with a 29/25/5 preflop style. Pretty sure I can’t play that LAG when I’m 4-6 tabling.

Another cool thing about the session was I got to play a bit with zero2lose. He’s apparently one of the biggest MSNL winners around, and I believe it given that he always seems to have huge stacks. He had a pretty interesting style – kind of a “sophisticated” 21/16/3 style. He was aggressive but he knew how to pick his spots.

One big difference I noticed in our play is that he leads out at way more pots than I do when oop. I think this lets him get away with playing a bit looser oop than is usually standard, because he does a much better job of getting payed off with big hands oop. E.g., he called my button open from the SB with ATo, and led into me and the BB on an AAKhh flop. The BB called, I folded, and he bet strongly again on the turn. They ended up getting all-in with the same hand but I think his line is good – I probably would have gone for a check/raise on the flop or the turn, which is probably a really poor play because people will check behind a lot on that kind of flop.

Oddly enough, the one time he didn’t lead out with a big hand in a multi-way pot I stacked him. Pretty standard I guess but I really wasn’t sure how much to raise on the turn… I’m not sure I like shoving but the stack sizes make it a little awkward to do anything else. I opted for a tiny raise (I’m presumably a total unknown to him) just to make sure it’d be easy to get all-in on the river.

Anyways time for some sleep. Blargh, I just can’t seem to get back on a normal schedule.

Blargh

Just finished a really tilty session on FTP. I dropped about $1650 or so playing a mix of 2/4 and 3/6. As usual I started off doing pretty well at 2/4 and not so well at 3/6, but then I got coolered a couple times by ridiculous fish and started to tilt pretty badly. Basically my image was horrible on all my tables and people kept calling me down really really light, but since I was tilting I didn’t use it to my advantage. I ended up breaking even at 2/4 and dropped a little under 3 buyins at 3/6.

So, pretty frustrating… especially since the 3/6 games were again incredibly soft today, so it would have been nice to crush for a bit. It really is bizarre how bad some of these people play, but I couldn’t capitalize on it for some reason.

Anyways, I might take a break from 3/6 for a bit. My results there always suck so I should probably figure out what the hell I’m doing wrong before I lose any more money there.

Slowly but surely…

For some reason the 3/6 tables were full of ridiculous fish today so I decided to try them out again. I picked up $700 in about 1.5k hands (about 400 of which were at 2/4), so overall an okay result.

For some reason I’ve still got a psychological hurdle to get over before I really feel comfortable at 3/6 though. Basically whenever I try to move up in limits I tend to get way too aggressive – I throw out tons of 4bet bluffs, double and triple barrels, check/raises etc. I guess I worry about having a losing session so I go a bit nuts trying to win every pot. I got stacked a couple times today in really silly spots so I’m disappointed I didn’t win a bunch more.

One interesting thing about the session was that I ran into probably the best nit I’ve ever played against – this guy was playing something like 14/11 I think, but he had moves. I just don’t understand how he could fit so much deception into range – he was pretty perplexing to hand read against. His strategy was basically to play super nitty but throw in absurd amounts of aggression whenever he decided to play a hand. I kept getting the urge to 4bet bluff him preflop but I was pretty sure he’d have no problem 5bet rebluffing, given that I’d have to give his nitty stats some respect. He was fun to play against, that’s for sure.

Anyways my point is just that it was cool to see someone manipulate his range so deceptively without having to play even remotely lag. There are lots of interesting ways to play the game besides the usual 22/18 “tag with tricks” style.

Peace everyone, time to go watch some Buffy 🙂

CTS’s videos are incredible

Seriously, it’s just scary how smart this guy is – his videos alone are worth the price of joining cardrunners (as are aba’s). The depth and clarity of his analysis is honestly shocking – and he does it all so quickly! I’ve tried making a few videos and I feel like I spend most of my time going “um” and “uh”, whereas he spends the whole time rapidly articulating intricate points about random bits of poker theory, with basically no pauses whatsoever.

In summary, the kid is a stud.